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Transparency in film: increasing credibility of scientific animation using citation

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Scientific animations have tremendous potential as instruments of insight and dissemination. However, audiences are often unable to determine the degree to which visualizations are informed by scientific evidence. By providing a more detailed account of source use, developers can increase the credibility of animations as scientific tools.

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Figure 1: Elements in a scene from a scientific animation.
Figure 2: Example output formats for using citation in a scientific animation.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported in part by grants NSF #DUE-1220512 from the US National Science Foundation and SSHRC #SIG-13/14 from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The image in Figure 1 was adapted from an animation by S.G.J. (https://vimeo.com/70039214/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Stuart G. Jantzen and Jodie Jenkinson are at the Biomedical Communications Unit, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.,

    Stuart G Jantzen & Jodie Jenkinson

  2. Gaël McGill is at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Gaël McGill

Authors
  1. Stuart G Jantzen
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  2. Jodie Jenkinson
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  3. Gaël McGill
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Contributions

S.G.J. developed the concepts and wrote the manuscript. J.J. and G.M. provided direction and contributed to the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stuart G Jantzen.

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Competing interests

G.M. is President and CEO of Digizyme, Inc.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Figure 1

Citation tasks performed alongside a computer animation workflow. (PDF 128 kb)

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Jantzen, S., Jenkinson, J. & McGill, G. Transparency in film: increasing credibility of scientific animation using citation. Nat Methods 12, 293–297 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3334

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